François Boucher was a French painter, born in Paris in 1703, who died there in 1770. He painted pink nudes, shepherdesses and gods for the court of Louis XV, was the favorite painter of Madame de Pompadour, and became First Painter to the King in 1765. He is remembered for a sentence Denis Diderot wrote about him: that he could do everything except tell the truth.
For a generation, his taste was the taste of France. Then the critics of the Enlightenment decided it was a lie, and the verdict stuck.
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Boucher painted Madame de Pompadour in 1756, and the picture is not what Diderot's insult leads you to expect. She sits in a green silk dress trimmed with pink bows, but she is not lounging. She holds a book. A quill and architectural drawings lie close by. The king's mistress is shown at work.
She was at work, because Pompadour spent royal money on the arts, and Boucher was one of the painters she kept busiest. He taught her to draw and to engrave, painted for her château at Bellevue, and drew the models for tapestries meant for the king's bedroom there.
In his review of the Salon of 1761, Diderot summed Boucher up in one sentence: "That man is capable of everything, except the truth." People have repeated it for two and a half centuries. Fewer ask what Boucher was actually paid to make, or whether the sentence is fair.
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